


on open wounds

by asofthaven



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Child Abuse, Enemies to Lovers, Hogwarts Sixth Year, Light Angst, M/M, Neglected Harry Potter, Not Canon Compliant - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Sexual Content, Touch-Starved Harry Potter, and draco defects, harry has a preoccupation with hands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:34:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28486935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asofthaven/pseuds/asofthaven
Summary: The game is this: find where it hurts. Stick a fingernail into it until the skin breaks, until it burrows through the flesh to strike bone. Harry doesn’t know how to win this game. He doesn’t know how to lose it, either. Since the beginning, he and Malfoy have been making up the rules as they go.In which Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy end a war. No, not that one.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter, background Lavender Brown/Ron Weasley
Comments: 15
Kudos: 140





	on open wounds

**Author's Note:**

> so i wrote the line 'They are each other's open wound' in a completely different drarry fic i was working on, and then promptly lost my mind and wrote this instead.
> 
> additional warnings: some references to self-harm. it's very mild, but i'm warning for it anyways. if there are any important tags you feel i've missed, please let me know.

More nights than he’d like to admit, Harry wakes up certain of his impending death. It’s not a nightmare, exactly. It’s just knowledge that presses insistently along his skull, etching itself into the delicate bone: _neither can live while the other survives_.

Which, okay. Harry stares at the deep red bed hangings overhead and thinks: _okay ,_ with the sort of cool, clear-headedness that he associates with withheld meals and the sound of his cupboard under the stairs locking. _Neither can live while the other survives._

Some things are inevitable. Death is one; hunger is another.

Draco Malfoy manages to be both.

  
  


The game is this: find where it hurts. Stick a fingernail into it until the skin breaks, until it burrows through the flesh to strike bone. Harry doesn’t know how to win this game. He doesn’t know how to lose it, either. Since the beginning, he and Malfoy have been making up the rules as they go.

  
  


There are easy violences. A fist to the sternum, a broken nose, knuckles scraped along cheekbones and jaws. Simple violences.

“Can’t you leave him alone this year?” Hermione demands in the aftermath, herding Harry towards the hospital wing. Her disapproving internal monologue is written across her face: _it’s only been a week and they’re already at each other’s throats!_

They have been, and she doesn’t even know the full extent of _how_. The thought makes Harry want to laugh, which makes his nose twinge. Hermione’s brisk _episkey_ had only sort-of worked, much to her confused consternation.

“I will if he does,” Harry offers, copper sliding sickly down the back of his throat. His nose really does hurt; for someone with such thin wrists, Malfoy has a solid punch. A strong grip, too, but that’s learned knowledge from a different occasion.

Harry presses the back of one hand under his nose to stem the flowing blood, scowling at the memory. “And, for the record, I _was_ just trying to talk to him.”

“ _Why?_ ” The question explodes out of Hermione, real concern wound up with exasperation. It feels like a bigger question, the kind you ask the universe knowing full well it won’t answer.

Harry shrugs an insufficient shoulder.

“Harry.” Hermione stops him just outside the doors to the hospital wing, her brows furrowed. Hermione’s concern is as brisk as everything else about her, but she falters, this once. “I just—I don’t understand your obsession with him.”

 _Me neither_ , Harry doesn’t say, because he _does_ . It’s only that no one, least of all him, can really accept an answer that begins and ends with the words _It’s Malfoy._ It's the simplest, most convoluted answer in the world.

“Listen, Hermione,” Harry says, trying to be calm and reasonable the way he never is, especially on the topic at hand. “Malfoy _is_ a Death—”

“Not this again, Harry!” Her voice is despairing, stealing the rest of Harry’s words from his mouth. Except he has proof, this time. He _does_ , if he can just figure out the right combination of words to get there.

There are messier violences. The sideways looks of grade school teachers who could never quite _see_ , the stealing of food from a meagre plate, the stinging finality of another person’s disbelief. Quieter violences.

Harry shuts his mouth, but it’s not an acquiescence.

There is a way to explain that he knows Malfoy is a Death Eater without starting by the inexplicable crush of their mouths, without putting words to precisely how he came to see the unsettling blackness of the Dark Mark against achingly soft skin. Harry just hasn’t figured it out yet. All logical and non-incriminating explanations scatter as soon as Harry opens his mouth, reduced to the certainty he’d known, instinctively, that day in Diagon Alley.

 _Obsession_ , Hermione had said; Ron calls it that, too. Harry thinks about the word later, when the sounds of sleep have settled inside the sixth-year boy’s dormitory. Wonders if that word explains why he’d woken with the sudden, visceral need to figure out what Malfoy’s cock would feel like in his mouth.

Harry grimaces, the dream fading. It was half memory, the feeling of Malfoy’s fingers twisting in his hair, the pink flush rushing up his neck. Harry knows that much. He _knows_. The knowledge is a damning, hateful thing, but Harry will find Malfoy and do something inadvisable all over again anyway.

  
  


The first problem: Harry’s skin has never fit right. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands, or why his body wants things he’s never known how to get. He has a thing about it, probably, one he’s not sure even Ron and Hermione know about. His _thing about it_ is evident in how he stiffens when someone touches the back of his neck, and how his skin prickles when he gets a hug he doesn’t expect, and how he wants to crawl out of his skin when he’s stuck shoulder-to-shoulder in a crowd for too long. Those touches are inexplicable things. Harry is continually braced for the blowback.

If there are hands at the back of his neck, it’s because Harry’s getting thrown in the cupboard. If someone’s arms are around him, it’s so they can hold him down while another person punches. If there is a crowd, it’s to point a finger at him for imagined infractions. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been since Harry first learned these lessons; those touches are expected things.

Malfoy’s touch is enigmatic, balancing the knife’s edge between Harry’s two knowns. Harry bites Malfoy’s lower lip and draws blood. Malfoy bites the pulse point in Harry’s neck and draws moans. Neither of them have gentle hands, but neither of them seem to mind the bruising. This is one of those enigmatic things.

The second problem: Draco Malfoy is a Death Eater, and he has to kill Dumbledore.

This is, admittedly, the bigger problem.

  
  


The revelation goes like this: it is September 1st. Summer is over. Harry has blood in his kiss-bruised mouth. Malfoy has a mark the shape of Harry’s teeth in the sweet spot of skin above his collarbone. A matching mark sits in the juncture of Harry’s neck. Their shirts are white flags thrown against the floor.

One could still call what they’d been doing _fighting._ If not before, it is now. A different kind of fight, a real one, with wars and prejudices and legacies echoing in the hot, stuffy air of the closed confines of the Hogwarts Express.

Harry has a hold of Malfoy’s left forearm, nails digging mercilessly into the raised edges of the Dark Mark. As if he can claw it off Malfoy’s skin if he just presses far enough.

Malfoy’s eyes are bright. They always are when he’s about to say something horrible, something that will find all the hurting things in Harry’s bones and twist. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t even seem to breathe.

They stare at each other.

The vindication of being right dwindles fast, leaving something twisting and dark in the pit of Harry’s stomach. It’s half fury, half a terrible, unsettling sense of betrayal. Like Voldemort has gone and taken another thing that first belonged to Harry.

It’s a stupid thought, but Harry can’t get rid of it.

Malfoy inhales, holding the breath for one second. Two. Harry finds himself imitating the act.

“You can’t change it.” Malfoy’s voice is clinical, like he’s run diagnostics and is just informing Harry of the results. It’s at odds with the tension wound through Malfoy, a thrum that Harry can feel alongside his own rage and incomprehension.

It’s not what Harry expects to hear. He isn’t sure _what_ he expected to hear; more diatribes in the vein of the Malfoy who taunted him on the train at the end of last year, maybe. Or that puffed up bragging from when the compartment was filled with Slytherins, before Harry was uncovered and the accusations of stalking started up. Certainly more of that snarling he did right at the beginning, when Harry first caught sight of the Mark.

“You can break the skin,” Malfoy continues, in that same voice. “But the Mark will always look the same.”

Harry looks at the Mark for a long moment, a physical revulsion joining the medley in his gut. At a loss for anything else, Harry asks, “Why would you take the Mark?”

It’s not the rage that surfaces in his words, though it’s still _there_ , an ever-present undercurrent to his voice. It’s the betrayal that takes the forefront, raw and unhappy. The mystery of what Malfoy is up to is abruptly very real, and very ugly; nothing at all like when they were younger and the mystery ended with deducted house points and detention. 

Harry had been _right_. He hadn’t considered what came after that.

Malfoy tilts his head slightly, jaw tightening. Grey eyes and pale lashes and a red mark at the side of his jaw from Harry’s teeth. His gaze prickles along Harry’s skin in a way that echoes that strange interlude where their mouths had come together mid-argument, that sudden, inevitable collision. The scrape of teeth along the column of a pale neck, blunt nails across bare skin, bitten lips moving in tandem. Harry’s mouth is still hot from it.

The look is gone a second later; Malfoy sneers, a familiar expression on unfamiliar ground. “To keep my family safe. Not that you would know anything about that, Potter.”

The fist to the face doesn’t surprise either of them, not really. The knee to the gut, the elbow between ribs; the blinds shake where Malfoy’s back hits the door and the seat cushion leaves a welt along Harry’s arm when he falls. Harry’s body burns every place Malfoy touches.

There’s always a struggle, and there’s always a victor. That’s what they’ve always been barrelling towards, this ever-present dichotomous swing: kiss or kill, fuck or fight, start a war or end one. The stakes always feel that high, where Draco Malfoy is involved.

“You didn’t _have_ to,” Harry manages to spit out, knees buckling as he loses his balance, and there’s a burr of—worry, at the edges of his rage.

Start a war or end one. Harry is tired of decisions that are earth-shattering.

Malfoy pins Harry beneath him, chest heaving. He snarls, “Give me another option, then.”

Harry’s hands curl into fists above his head, where Malfoy’s thin hands are a vice around his wrists. Malfoy sounds like a trapped animal. He repeats it, eyes burning a defiant, inescapable silver. “ _Give me another option.”_

Malfoy looks angry. He looks so, so angry as he stares down at Harry, his pale hair in disarray and his mouth pink and twisting. Like he would destroy a dozen golden trinkets in a fit of fury if given half the chance. Like he’s looking to start a war. Like he’s looking to end one.

Harry says, “You have to tell me everything, first.”

  
  


The first problem, part two: some people you will kiss, and it won’t change you. When Harry kissed Cho, all he’d felt afterwards was discomfort, the kiss eventually fading and forgotten in the back of his brain. Even now, he averts his eyes when he sees her.

Some people you will kiss, and it _will_ change you. Will make you think of all the other places a mouth can be, and how startlingly warm another person’s body is. Some people you will kiss, and you will suddenly _crave_. Harry didn’t know this until he began kissing Malfoy. When Harry kisses Malfoy, it’s all he can do to keep his heart from bursting out of his chest after him.

This is the reason for the abandoned classrooms, and the soft ground behind greenhouse number 2, and the hidden alcoves scattered through the castle. For Malfoy’s mouth, and Malfoy’s hands, and Malfoy’s—

Malfoy doesn’t have a _thing about it_ , Harry’s noticed; Malfoy’s body always seems to do exactly what it intends to, doesn’t jerk away when it wants to curve closer, doesn’t turn tense when it wants to melt.

Malfoy sucks at a spot on Harry’s hip, and Harry twitches away and says, _I don’t know how to breathe when you do that_ , so Malfoy does it again and again and again until Harry is gasping nonsense into the air, hips and cock begging upwards, and then Malfoy pulls away to say, _figured it out yet?_ His irises blown are wide and there are teeth marks trailing the length of his flushed neck, sweat glistening along all his bare skin; he says that, in an unsteady mocking lilt, and he’s the prettiest thing Harry’s ever seen and Harry wants to leave another mark on him to see if that will help.

 _Figured it out yet?_ Malfoy asks, and Harry says _no_ , because that’s his excuse: he hasn’t figured anything out, nothing at all, and Malfoy smirks and obligingly dips his head back down, and—

Harry doesn’t know what Malfoy’s excuse is. 

  
  


Dumbledore is more memory than person, nowadays. This is inconvenient primarily because it forces Harry and Malfoy to try the conversation lark again, since their obvious solution is gone and no one can quite say when he’ll be back.

The short of it is this: Malfoy does not want to kill Dumbledore and wants to continue under Voldemort’s employ even less. They might even be able to come up with a solution themselves, if they could keep their words civil and their knuckles to themselves.

“I fucking hate you,” Harry says instead, to the ceiling. His throat hurts, and not from the sorts of things he dreams about. Harry is laying on his back on the stone floor, Malfoy a huddled form at his peripheral.

“Of course you do,” Malfoy says patronizingly. The line of his mouth is furious, his grey eyes flinty; they have argued each other into circles, farther and farther from the actual topic they were meant to resolve. Every word seems to be a landmine, and neither are willing to shy away from the explosion.

Harry takes a few seconds to breathe, feeling the buzz of his magic rattle the desks in their co-opted classroom. Malfoy interspersed a highly unimpressed lecture on Harry's lack of control over his magic in-between insults and non-answers, and Harry’s pretty sure one of them will end up with another broken nose if _someone_ doesn’t wrestle the situation back to the start.

“Did you?” Harry repeats. The bald accusation speaks for itself; the chance that the answer will change anything between them is less clear. “Think it was an honor?”

“I,” Malfoy says, with biting mildness, “didn’t know anything.”

Harry laughs humorlessly. “When did you figure _that_ out?”

Malfoy’s nostrils flare, his eyes darting away.

“ _Malfoy_.”

His lips thin. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You’re gonna tell me anyway,” Harry says. He sits up and scoots forward a little, until there’s only a palmful of space between them. “Don’t bother pretending you won’t.”

Malfoy promised to tell Harry everything and, to his surprise, Malfoy _has_. As if he’d been dying to tell someone about the vanishing cabinets and Voldemort's threats, about how success and failure alike coil heavily around his neck.

Malfoy is the only other person Harry knows who has death hanging so low overhead in so intimate a way. Choices made true by the hands of others. _Neither can live while the other survives_.

 _Okay_ , Harry says, to himself; Malfoy says, to himself, _watch me_. If only to wrench the control back for a moment longer, if only to savor one more breath.

Harry can’t decide how he feels about this. He thinks he would admire it, if he learned about this relentless determination in an ordinary context. It’s awful and intoxicating, how desperately Malfoy clings to life.

 _There’s a prophecy,_ Harry thinks about sharing. _I don’t want to be a murderer either. Give me another option for_ that _._

“I fucking hate you,” Malfoy whispers, with feeling.

Hearing it said back to him makes Harry immediately understand how stupid it sounds, declaring their hate for each other like this. As if it matters anymore.

“Of course you do,” Harry mimics snidely, holding Malfoy’s gaze.

Malfoy looks away first, turning his whole body so that Harry mostly has a view of him in three-quarters. His body is a long, tense line when he speaks.

“There were people in the dungeons when I got home for the summer. Muggles, mostly. Some—muggleborns. Aunt Bellatrix fetched me in the middle of the night. Midnight. New moon. Ritualistic rot. I already knew what was going to happen, obviously.”

There’s something in the catch of his voice that doesn’t square with the Malfoy that Harry knows. Something self-loathing and anxious, his long fingers unnervingly still despite their bloodless grip on his trousers.

“It hurt. It—I know it doesn’t matter,” Malfoy adds, with a blazing sort of defensiveness, “But it did. I didn’t think something spoke about with such honor—” The word spits itself out of his mouth, the admission Harry has been waiting for. “—would be so painful. And after, he—”

Malfoy, apparently reflexively, grabs his left forearm and squeezes, hard enough that Harry imagines the bones are grinding together. He continues, in a very even voice, “I had to use an Unforgivable.”

Harry’s first, far-away thought is that it makes a second person his age that has cast an Unforgivable. Him and Malfoy, alike again in the oddest of unwanted, juxtaposed ways.

Then the implications and its horror rushes in, eclipsing this thought entirely. Harry abruptly abhors the fact that he can’t see Malfoy’s face. He leans forward to tug at Malfoy’s shoulders until they’re face to face. Malfoy slaps Harry’s hands down, but doesn’t look away. The little color in him has abandoned him completely. He doesn’t look like a living boy anymore.

Harry’s heartbeat is loud in his ears, his throat constricted around bile. “You shouldn’t have,” he says, before he can stop himself.

Malfoy pins him with an intense, uncomfortable look. He says, voice still measured and even, “I didn’t think it would mean anything.”

Harry’s gut twists at the callous admission, sick and tired and _angry_. “How could you _think_ that?”

“Because I,” Malfoy repeats, voice like thin ice cracking on impact, gaze unwavering, “didn’t know _anything_.”

And it means so very much, and absolutely nothing at all.

“Which one?” Harry asks after a long moment. Realistically, he thinks he knows.

Malfoy's eyes are a distant, overcast sky. Harry brushes his fingers along the side of Malfoy’s neck, to prove to himself that there’s a person there, someone more boy than ghost.

Malfoy’s skin is cold, but his pulse hammers under Harry’s fingers. He looks resigned to having Harry’s hand there, at his neck; Harry thinks, with disquieting certainty, that he could hurt Malfoy. That Malfoy might not stop him.

Harry drops his hand and tangles his fingers in the hem of his jumper.

Malfoy doesn’t answer.

 _Fine_ , Harry thinks, as the silence stretches on and on and on. _Let it fester for us both._

  
  


Harry holds a version of Malfoy in the palm of either hand. The first is the boy who, up until very recently, held Voldemort in actual esteem. This is the Malfoy that Harry ends up in shouting matches and fist fights with, who Harry tells to _try harder you ignorant fuck_ , the one who wanted another option and ended up choosing Harry’s trainwreck of a destiny to hinge his own life on. This is the Malfoy that infuriates him.

The second is the boy, sixteen and boneless in Harry’s lap, humming his pleasure into Harry’s neck and urging Harry towards his own. This is the Malfoy he maps out with his mouth, the one who has found a hundred ways to make Harry fall apart and invented a hundred more to put him back together. This is the Malfoy that infatuates him.

They are, of course, the same boy. It’s just easier, if Harry pretends they’re not. If he puts up a screen between the conversations he has with the first Malfoy, and the fumbles he has with the second Malfoy. If he pretends—well. If he pretends.

  
  


The opportunity to speak with Professor McGonagall about Malfoy presents itself accidentally, after class when Harry is running late and overhearing her concerns that Malfoy hasn’t turned in some assignments.

Harry’s time is up the moment the words _Death Eater_ pass through his lips.

“That is a very serious accusation.” Her eyes are very stern, the set of her mouth telling Harry that she’s disappointed in him. Harry falters mid-word. He’s reminded, all over again, that adults don’t listen to him. They always think he’s lying.

McGonagall sighs, as if his lack of immediate reply means that she’s right. Harry’s shoulders tighten at the sound.

“I won’t deny that Mr. Malfoy has been acting differently this year,” she says. There’s an emphasis on the word _differently_ that Harry doesn’t know how to interpret. Is it a good thing, because Malfoy hasn’t been bullying anyone in the corridors between classes? Or is it a bad thing, because he hasn’t been interacting with anyone, really, keeping himself isolated from the rest of his house and the school? Malfoy’s time is increasingly pulled to the Room of Hidden Things, where two-thirds of their not-Dumbledore plan wait for his repair.

Malfoy isn’t sleeping. He hasn’t said so, but Harry is paying attention. He notices the darkening circles under Malfoy’s eyes, and the way he nods off on Harry’s shoulder post-orgasm, looking soft and boyish for those few stolen minutes.

Harry wonders if he has nightmares. It’s another thing they probably have in common that they don’t talk about.

“Nevertheless,” McGonagall continues, bringing Harry abruptly out of his musings, “There is no reason a sixteen year old boy would be involved with You-Know-Who. I would think you’d know better than to make allegations like that, Mr. Potter.”

Harry’s shoulders get even tighter, his skin prickling uncomfortably. Voldemort doesn’t care that Malfoy’s sixteen. Voldemort doesn’t care that _Harry’s_ sixteen. It’s only everyone else that seems to think that war has an unpassable age line.

Harry leaves the office with his teeth clenched so tightly, his jaw trembles. The feeling follows him throughout the rest of the day, making his magic unpredictable and his classmates wary and silent.

It rains halfway through quidditch practice that evening, which is just—just fucking perfect, really. He ends practice a half-hour early, then goes to stand under the shower in the locker room until the water runs cold; the mud melts off of him and tears sting at the backs of his eyes and he, stupidly, wants to press his nose into the clean skin of Malfoy’s neck and _breathe_.

He won’t. Obviously. But when he gets back to the castle, he still captures an irate Malfoy—sporting the beginnings of a black eye from their earlier fight, after Harry stormed out of McGonagall’s classroom and right into an already frazzled Malfoy—and drags him into the nearest classroom to make up for the injury. The confrontation had been short and explosive, and now, in the falling twilight, Harry can’t figure out why it happened at all when _this_ is the part they’re both after, really.

Malfoy kisses his nape after; feather-light, practically imagined if not for the very real warmth it leaves in its wake. He’s started doing this, sometimes, these tiny, tentative kisses after the urgency has fled them both. Harry thinks there’s something very sideways and backwards about the progression of it all, but that doesn’t mean he wants it to stop. Something in him will rebel, if it stops.

They sit in the quiet for several minutes, until their breathing evens out; it’s the sort of quiet that means it’s okay for Harry to burrow into Malfoy’s side, seeking the scent that will follow him long after they’ve parted, for Malfoy to run his fingers through Harry’s curls, detangling the knots in an absent sort of way. These are fragile silences.

They haven’t talked about this, the touching. A war and its machinations are easier to talk about than the tiny secrets of each other’s skin.

 _I don’t think that’s how this is supposed to work_ , Harry wants to confess. But he’s not an expert in these matters.

There’s a tin of bruise paste courtesy of Hermione in Harry’s bag, nicked after his first fight with Malfoy. He retrieves it now, to use on the bruised skin around those dove-grey eyes.

Malfoy flinches, just the tiniest bit, at the touch of the paste to his skin. Harry’s fingers freeze. The light filtering through the window is orange-tinged, turning Malfoy’s eyes and hair a brief, dazzling gold. After a moment, Malfoy closes his eyes, leaning into the touch. Harry continues, rubbing the paste into his skin with tiny, uncertain circles. The post-coital langour is fizzling, leaving Harry to deal again with his heavy, awkward hands and the wrongness of his skin.

“Why didn’t you heal it?” he asks, as the paste forces Malfoy's skin to bloom purple then fade, in increments, to blue-green-yellow-pink. Malfoy’s gotten paler, and thinner, but Harry’s eyes still can’t help but linger along the panes of his face.

 _Obsession_ , Hermione’s voice says, from very far away. Harry ignores it.

Malfoy opens his eyes slowly. His eyelashes are very long, but Harry already knew that. He knew that even before he was close enough to touch Malfoy. “Couldn’t be bothered. It isn’t like I saw much of anyone after.”

Harry rubs a bit of the paste on the bruised bridge of Malfoy’s nose before capping the tin. “You were working on the cabinet? All day?”

“I was,” Malfoy confirms, unconcerned, “And I've gotten the pensieve to work.”

The pensieve is one of Malfoy’s less outlandish ideas, making up one part of the two-thirds of their plan, alongside the cabinet. “That’s impressive,” Harry says, because it is. He wishes it’d been fixed before he tried to speak with McGonagall. He wonders if Malfoy prioritized it _because_ Harry tried to speak with McGonagall already.

His cheeks a pleased pink, Malfoy says, "Don't bother with flattery," and unceremoniously plucks the tin from Harry’s hand. He takes a bit of the paste to rub at a spot high on Harry’s neck.

Harry jerks back, his face flushing.

Malfoy stays where he is, hand outstretched. Harry isn’t sure what expression he’s wearing, but it makes the ghost of a grin appear on Malfoy’s face. He says, “People will notice it. I made it too high.”

“I—” _I don’t mind_. Or maybe, _I don’t care_ . Or, even worse, _I want them to_. Harry shakes his head, leans forward again with a faint, “You’re right.”

“Of course I am,” Malfoy says, with a hint of the haughty tones that have mostly abandoned him since the start of the year. His fingers are gentle when they run over the kissmark. Like this, Harry can almost believe all the things he pretends about the two of them. He closes his eyes. His skin prickles.

He opens them when Malfoy’s touch retreats, asking, “Any others?”

Harry crosses his ankles and pulls his knees to his chest. He knows there are, even if he can’t see the ones Malfoy left near his shoulder blades. He _can_ see the ones on the insides of his thighs, dark and tender distractions from the burn of Malfoy’s fingers working him open. Harry’s fingers itch to press down on them.

The last sunrays are slipping slowly and surely away, leaving them in incremental shadows when Harry says, “None that anyone else is gonna see.”

Malfoy’s eyes snap up at that, and Harry has the sudden, startling realization that Malfoy thought he was doing this with other people.

It’s not something Harry has even considered, for either of them, and now, anxious, he says, “I don’t—I mean, there isn’t—but if you, erm, do you—?”

“No,” Malfoy says, very quickly. There’s something at the edges of his mouth, softer and more uncertain than the almost-grin from earlier. More boy than ghost, more Draco than Malfoy. Harry has to avert his eyes, otherwise he might do something idiotic like kiss him softly, without any teeth.

 _I think we’re messing this up,_ Harry considers saying, with a bone-deep sense of foreboding _. I don’t know how, but we’re messing all of this up._

“Okay,” Harry says instead. Outside the windows set high in the wall, October continues its quiet march towards November.

  
  


Harry knows a thing or two about greed. The first thing he knows is this: the direct corollary to greed is a want. In order to not be greedy, you must not want anything. This is why Harry has to fold his wants into the tiniest pieces he can, because otherwise someone will notice and take even the scraps away. Learned knowledge.

The second thing he knows is this: his very existence is greedy, which is why he is fundamentally unlovable. Being greedy makes you ungrateful; being ungrateful means you’ll never earn affection, and never earning affection means you should just do your best impersonation of a plaster wall until you get so good at the impersonation that you won’t even question why you live in a cupboard anymore.

Harry should know better than to want things, is the point. But the third thing he knows is this: no matter how good of an actor you are, greed only grows.

Harry isn’t a particularly good actor.

  
  


Harry’s half-convinced Malfoy doesn’t eat anymore. It’s going on a full week that he hasn’t seen Malfoy across the Great Hall during lunch _or_ dinner, and the only times Harry has seen him at breakfast is when Parkinson or Goyle appears to drag him into the hall behind them.

Harry spreads out the Marauder’s Map the moment he gets back to his dormitory, his shoulders tense as he scans for Malfoy’s dot. If Malfoy isn’t on the map, Harry’s just going to have to head to the Room of Hidden Things and drag him away from the cabinet or the pensieve or the stack of letters from his mother, with their entreaties for him to report some progress, _any,_ or at the least, appeal to Snape for assistance.

Harry wants to incinerate the lot of them.

Malfoy is in the Slytherin dormitory, two dots labelled ‘Gregory Goyle’ and ‘Vincent Crabbe’ on either side of the room. Harry’s shoulders relax.

He had been more than a little surprised to find that Malfoy really _did_ consider them friends, though not with the same fierce bond that Harry has with Ron and Hermione. Just enough for Malfoy to worry about what will happen to them as the war progresses, since they also have Death Eaters for fathers and Malfoy, at least, doesn’t have any illusions about children not being drafted into war.

 _They never learned to think for themselves_ , Malfoy had said, once, anxious and unhappy, and Malfoy isn’t stupid, so Harry had kept his tongue rather than point out the obvious. For nearly an entire minute.

“There you are,” says Ron’s voice, unexpectedly close. Harry jerks his head up to find Ron giving him a funny look from the foot of his bed. “Thought you might have gone to bed already.”

His gaze drops, very casually, to the map laid out in Harry’s lap. By the time Harry has thought to lift it up, Ron is already turning to his own bed, asking, “What are you doing?” in a wary tone.

“Nothing,” Harry responds, feeling flustered. Guilt is a living thing in his throat, growing thicker and darker with every passing day that he doesn’t muster up the courage to tell his best friends about Malfoy. He’s been practicing this part, if only in the space of his own head, since McGonagall’s office: Malfoy is a Death Eater. I saw his Dark Mark. He told me everything.

Harry sits up and says, before he can lose his nerve, “I need to talk to you about something.”

“What is it?”

“Malfoy—” Harry starts, and that’s the exact moment Ron mentally tunes out of the conversation. Harry can see it in the glaze of his eyes. He could probably finish by saying _is a really fucking good shag_ and Ron might not even hear it. Maybe.

It feels like it should mean something, is all. It sits there, a waiting confession.

But then Harry pictures what Ron’s face would look like if any variation of the words _I slept with Malfoy_ made it past his lips, and shame coalesces into a tight ball at the bottom of his stomach. It shouldn’t be what he’s focused on, anyways. There’s a more pressing problem to deal with.

“—is a Death Eater,” Harry finishes, watching Ron keenly. Ron lifts a copy of the Sports section of the Prophet—swiped from Seamus’ nightstand—higher and ignores Harry completely.

“I’m serious. He was Marked this summer,” Harry tries. Pitching his voice a little louder, trying to get the information out, he says, “Voldemort wants him to kill Dumbledore.”

“Don’t be barmy,” Ron snaps, with a twitch at Voldemort’s name.

“I—”

Ron interrupts with a frustrated breath. “Just because he’s not bothering you as much this year doesn’t mean he’s in league with You-Know-Who, Harry.”

Harry drops his gaze back to the map, to watch the tight circle Malfoy’s dot makes in his dorm room. His fingers tremble against the aged parchment, and he has to let go to ensure he doesn’t accidentally rip it. 

It’s like that muggle story, about wolves and boys and crying. Maybe it’s Harry’s fault, that no help is coming.

Maybe Harry just isn’t the sort of person help is meant to come to.

  
  


This is the quietest nightmare Harry has: there is a pool, and he is drowning. The pool is as deep and dark as the Great Lake, though it didn’t seem that way when Harry first had the nightmare. That came later.

But there is a pool, and Harry is drowning, or he is being drowned. It depends on the night. Above the water, people are gathered. They’re close, always close enough that they could reach out a hand and draw him out of the water.

Dream knowledge: Harry isn’t allowed to get closer himself. He has to wait for them to get close first.

Learned knowledge: if he tries to get close, they’ll dunk his head under the water and hold him there.

Harry watches them watch him fall under, features distorted by chlorine and water and harsh fluorescent lights. He has to save himself. It’s always the only option.

In the nightmare, he never can.

  
  


Harry’s attempt to talk with Dumbledore about Malfoy is a failure because the truth of it gets all tangled up in his throat. He just—gets a little worked up, wherever Malfoy is concerned, and Dumbledore’s inscrutable expression doesn’t help his nerves or his rising frustration. Dumbledore stares placidly, insists that Malfoy isn’t Harry’s concern and shuts the conversation down there. Harry, Dumbledore says, has other concerns to focus on.

They wade through memories about Tom Riddle and Dumbledore dances around his theories on how to defeat him and says that the last piece of this incomprehensible puzzle is a memory from Slughorn. Harry is still too preoccupied with figuring out the right way to explain that Malfoy _is_ Harry’s concern, that he’s _always_ been, to wonder how, exactly, he’s meant to get a man to open up about the thing he’s most ashamed of.

“Thank you, sir,” Harry says as he leaves, when what he really wants to say is, _I don’t know how to not be concerned about Malfoy._

There’s years worth of animosity and weeks of figuring out new ways to throw their bodies at each other that testify to the terrifying undercurrent that has been there since the very beginning, before Harry even knew who Draco Malfoy _was_. When he was just a pale, pointy boy next to Harry in a robe shop, before he’d opened his mouth and ruined everything before it even started.

Harry lingers in the empty corridor after stepping off the moving staircase, his gut churning. The idea of telling Malfoy that he failed to convince Dumbledore leaves him cold to his fingertips. But he promised to talk to Malfoy after the meeting. So instead of turning in the direction of Gryffindor Tower, Harry heads to their unofficial classroom in a disused area of the dungeon.

Malfoy’s white-blond head is bowed over a desk on one side of the room when Harry arrives, half-folded origami and loose parchment haphazardly stacked at his elbow, his inkpot perched improbably atop it. The classroom’s built-in _lumos_ charm is lit, but low, softening Malfoy’s sharp features; for a moment, the only sound is the fast scratch of Malfoy’s quill. Sometimes, in those breaths before they notice each other, Harry thinks of him first as _Draco_.

Then he lifts his head and they notice each other, so what comes out of Harry’s mouth is, “Malfoy.”

“Potter. Cutting it rather close, aren’t you?” Malfoy says irritably. The bags under his eyes have gotten worse. It’s more unsettling than Harry’s prepared to admit.

“I didn’t exactly get a timetable for lessons with Dumbledore,” Harry snaps automatically, as he crosses to the desk. But the coldness in his fingers has moved into his mouth; it steals the heat from the words. He can’t meet Malfoy’s eyes.

“Salazar prohibit the exactitude of a schedule,” Malfoy scoffs. He sticks something into his book to mark his place, then packs his bag with sharp, agitated movements. “Surely an estimate of the length of your lessons would not be remiss. What sort of a professor, even a former one, isn’t able to judge the length of a lesson? Honestly, you’d think—”

Recently, Harry has been learning the shape worry makes across Malfoy’s body—the stiff shoulders, the purposeful hands, the specific cadence of voice he’s hearing, right now. It’s easy to forget about the fear hidden under all the short-tempered foulness that escapes Malfoy, but it’s there and it’s weighty. Malfoy's spine bows with it.

“He said it wasn’t my concern,” Harry says, interrupting the fit Malfoy is working himself into. Harry stares at his hands, says, “He—I don’t know. I don’t think he believed me.”

At this point, it shouldn’t even be surprising. Harry would only need one hand to count all the times he’s been in danger and an adult has actually believed him.

“Of course he didn’t,” Malfoy says, sounding—odd. Like there’s something horrible caught in his throat that he doesn’t want to let out. A discordant laugh escapes despite this, something harsh and cutting that ripples across the surface of Harry’s emotions and finds kin in the undertow.

Malfoy didn’t have much faith in Dumbledore’s ability to be helpful—it’s part of his adamant refusal to go with Harry to speak with Dumbledore in the first place—but there’s a difference between saying that and actually being faced with the stone wall of indifference.

There’s a shiver in Harry’s chest; an old wound, reopening. An _old_ wound, from the time before magic; when Harry was small and thin, and thought that help would come if he only explained what the monster was.

 _One day_ , he thinks of telling his eleven-year-old self, _Malfoy will be the only one who sees the same monsters as you._

There’s a joke there, Harry is certain of it. The punchline is that they’re both drowning. It’s very funny if he refuses to think about why it makes him want to shatter the windows and bring down the walls.

Malfoy’s breathing has gone funny, the anxiety travelling into his lungs and out of his hands, which are trembling slightly as Malfoy’s chest hitches unevenly.

Harry forces his tongue to unstick from the roof of his mouth, his own blood pressure rising in response to Malfoy’s distress. He says, “Malfoy, don’t—”

“Don’t _what_?” Malfoy spits the words out, voice thin, his face alight with something that looks far too breakable to be fury. It’s not fury, but his hands seem to think it is. They’ve curled into tight fists.

Harry doesn’t know how to do comfort. His mouth is almost as discomfited as his body, which simultaneously wants to pull Malfoy closer and also keep him far, far away. He thinks both options would be a mistake, so instead he says, the words falling flat, “I’ll think of something else.”

“Of _course_ you will.” The sarcasm is thick enough for Harry to taste, when Malfoy turns on him. Malfoy and his fists, which are not furious, but maybe want to be; Malfoy and his face, which is fragile the way Malfoy never admits to being. “What could I _possibly_ do without Saint Potter? The _Chosen One._ ”

Malfoy is something that wants to cut first. He’s always been. Which means Harry should know better, _he should know better_ , but he hates those titles and Malfoy knows that, doesn’t he? Malfoy always knows the things that Harry hates, and what Harry hates with a special sort of fury is when Malfoy takes his name away from him, when he’s reduced from _Potter_ to a litany of headline-grabbing epithets.

It’s worse, almost, than being called _boy_ , because Harry is certain that Uncle Vernon never once thought of Harry as _Harry_ , but Harry _knows_ that Malfoy thinks of him first and foremost as _Potter_.

“Don’t fucking call me that.” An angry flush is starting under Harry’s collar, creeping into his throat. “Don’t _fucking_ call me that.”

Malfoy’s lip curls, creeping fracture points along delicate glass. And more than the name-taking, more than the closed fists, Harry absolutely _loathes_ that particular expression, the one that wants to be fury but isn’t.

Harry has never seen Malfoy cry. This is the expression that makes him think he might.

Harry yanks Malfoy forward, their knees and chests crashing against each other gracelessly. It’s not quite a kiss, this scrape of teeth against thin lips, but that doesn’t matter. It never does, really, because the hunger is so big and so irrepressible and so _there_ that it overshadows everything else. Malfoy’s mouth opens hot and savage against Harry’s, fingers unclenching to bury themselves in Harry’s curls, tight enough to hurt.

Harry gasps, as much from the shock of pain as from the rush of arousal, his grip going weak against Malfoy’s collar.

They’ve done this enough, by now. Maybe not as often as some dark, unexplored part of Harry would like, but enough that anticipation coils fierce and liquid in his gut when Malfoy sits him on the desk, hands already working at undoing Harry’s trousers.

Enough, also, to tell that something is—off. Wrong. Malfoy’s hands have gone odd and ill-fitting, trying to recapture movements it doesn’t know anymore. 

Harry knows this, even if Malfoy might not, because Harry’s body is well-acquainted with not fitting within his skin and his hands are familiar with becoming clumsy. Malfoy does not have clumsy hands. Malfoy’s hands are beautiful, long and sure and strong, painting pictures in the air and across the expanse of Harry’s body like the universe itself wanted for a masterpiece and found it in the angle of his wrists and the crook of his fingers.

Malfoy’s hands don’t ever touch Harry like they’re terrified.

This is why Harry picks his head up from where it was tucked against Malfoy’s neck, and asks, “Why are you upset?”

The question douses them both in frigid lake water. Harry finds himself blinking stupidly, shocked at his own voice. Malfoy blinks back at him.

“I’m not,” Malfoy says. He pauses, every part of him stilling; says, with frustration, “I’m not upset.”

“Okay,” Harry says, and then doesn’t know what to do. Doesn’t know why his skin is prickling when this is usually the part where it forgets itself, or why it bothers him that Malfoy is saying that he’s not upset when he is. Harry feels stifled, suddenly. He wants to go back to before he opened his mouth, wants to get to the part where everything is reduced to pleasure and movement, but he also—doesn’t. “Fine.”

Malfoy holds his gaze as he pulls away, not far enough to break the hold they have on each other. He doesn’t do anything else. Just watches Harry with curved shoulders and a little furrow between his eyebrows.

Harry, hands twisted into the crisp fabric of Malfoy’s button up, holds himself very still. Like a plaster wall.

“Why are _you_ upset?” Malfoy asks, pretty and pink-cheeked and cross.

“I’m not.” Harry’s response is automatic. _Is_ he upset? Harry doesn’t know. He never knows when he’s upset unless something has already broken because of it. His heart is going _thump thump thump_ somewhere near his throat and his skin is prickling all over, but that’s Harry’s baseline, most of the time. Most of the time, he feels like this, which means he isn’t upset. He’s just—he’s just—

“Right,” Malfoy says, flat. His hands are resting at Harry’s hips, no longer trembling. Not clumsy or terrified, either. Just hands. Harry doesn’t know why he thought he could divine something from them.

Malfoy’s hands abruptly tighten. Harry jolts, a brief flash of panic overtaking him for no reason at all, until he looks at Malfoy’s face. He’s scowling at a spot on Harry’s shoulder, but he doesn’t seem mad at Harry.

“I,” Malfoy says, his voice quiet and petulant, “thought he would believe you.”

“Oh,” Harry says, something twisting in his chest. But Malfoy still doesn’t seem mad at him for it.

Malfoy’s scowl darkens. Even quieter, like the hiss of dead leaves across stiff grass, he says, “I’m upset that he didn’t.”

He looks up, grey eyes searching Harry’s face carefully, cautiously. Waiting, Harry realizes, for him to speak.

The realization leaves him shaken. He doesn’t know how to do that, to say what he’s feeling. He can tell for other people, has _had_ to be good at that, but this, _this_ is not a lesson he was ever taught. Harry knows anger. He doesn’t know much of anything else.

“I’m tired,” Harry starts, haltingly, because Malfoy’s stare is so intent that it doesn’t cross his mind to not answer, “of not being listened to.”

It’s simple, suddenly. He _is_ upset; he’s upset that nobody will take him seriously. He resents the quiet dismissal of his concerns. He hates how powerless he feels to do the one thing Malfoy’s asked of him.

“I’m upset, too,” Harry continues, the statement a revelation on his tongue. He bites on the inside of his lip, to stop his face from crumpling.

Malfoy has never seen him cry, either.

Malfoy closes that small gap of space between them, his hands traveling up from Harry’s hips to his waist, overlapping each other along Harry’s spine. It’s not quite a hug. Just—a motion. A way to check that Harry is real and solid.

“Truly shocking,” Malfoy says, his voice suspiciously even. He holds Harry very tightly. “I hadn’t the faintest.”

“Oh, fuck you.” Harry presses his nose into Malfoy’s skin and scowls. It’s warm, here; warmer still, when Harry hooks his arms around Malfoy’s thin shoulders. Then his legs, too, until he’s as wrapped up around Malfoy as he can be while still fully clothed. The prickling under his skin quiets and then fades, as they stay like that.

And the oddest thing about it all is that Malfoy doesn’t even seem to mind.

  
  


Later, Harry will say, “You could always try to speak with Dumbledore yourself,” without an ounce of conviction, and Malfoy’s pretty mouth will scrunch with distaste. “Even you don’t believe that.”

“Yeah, well,” Harry will say, legs still loose around Malfoy's hips and fingers worrying the fabric of Malfoy's shirt. “We need to trust _someone_.”

And it won’t be until evening has come and gone again that Harry will realize he said _we_.

  
  


The conclusion Harry comes to is this: he is a wick meant to be ignited and left to burn itself out. Not a candle wick, the sort of thing that can provide comfort and light. He’s the long wick of dynamite, a cartoon image taken from stolen glimpses of the morning shows Dudley used to watch. Something that leaves craters and dust.

This conclusion does not leave him angry. It doesn’t fill him with the blind fury that consumed him the day he tore through Dumbledore’s office, that horrible, horrible morning where Harry knew he was facing a world that no longer held Sirius. It’s not the sort of thing that makes Hermione flinch back from him, or Ron yell at him, or the furniture shake, and those are the only other things that Harry uses to determine whether or not he’s angry.

It is familiar, though, this cold clear thing that sometimes settles in Harry’s chest and refuses to thaw. Having Hermione on one side and Ron on the other will lessen its grip; Quidditch practice will do it, too. Gentle warmths, easing away some of the chill.

Malfoy does not do that. Malfoy is lit wick reflected back at him, a tangled, unyielding mess that Harry can’t look directly at, nevermind for long enough to puzzle out where it's headed. It’s something wild and greedy, and it punches through the ice with nary a concern for the cracks in its wake.

Harry doesn’t know which of them will end up dust, once that flame runs out. Maybe it’s both of them. It’s poetic, if it’s both.

  
  


The nights that Harry doesn’t sleep, he scripts letters he won’t send. Sometimes he composes them in his head; other nights, he writes them out in a furious, endless scrawl, his hand cramping with the force of all the things he has nobody to ask about.

“Who are you even writing them to?” Malfoy asks, crowded close and looking put out that Harry managed to _incendio_ the parchment before he could see it.

“My parents, mostly,” Harry admits, feeling defensive. He hadn’t expected to see anyone up here, and his heart is skittering about in his ribcage.

It’s that quiet non-hour between evening and morning, the sky outside the Astronomy Tower blue and still, the wintry moon yellow against the backdrop of the sky. This is what Harry blames for answering at all; that, the tired headache at his temple, and the familiar warmth radiating from Malfoy’s body when he leans in, as if for a kiss.

He lifts the glasses from Harry’s face instead, because he’s a fucking prick. “What are you telling them?”

“Stuff,” Harry says vaguely, lunging for Malfoy’s blurry form and managing to grab the sleeve of his impossibly soft jumper. Malfoy lifts his hand higher in response. Harry’s irritated huff is interrupted by a yawn, which he deals with by pressing his face into Malfoy’s chest.

Harry stays there, inhaling the scent of freshly laundered clothes and sharp cologne and the Malfoy-smell underneath. Stays there until his body stops expecting a blow that he knows, in his head if nowhere else, is not coming.

“Nightmare?” Malfoy asks, lowering his arm. His voice is quieter; he sounds sleepless now that he's not being difficult, like he’s maybe been abusing the prefect privileges he still has to wander about the castle unbothered.

“Mm,” Harry responds indistinctly, stealing his glasses back and shoving them onto his face before making it all moot by dropping head against Malfoy’s shoulder. The wind blows crisp, orange leaves into the open arches of the tower, the last stubborn vestiges of autumn.

Malfoy’s arms settle low on Harry’s back. “Tell me.”

Harry lifts his head, glasses smudged. Malfoy’s face is very close and Harry tilts his chin towards him, instinctively. “What?”

Malfoy drops a kiss, unhurried and sweet, on Harry’s lips, which is almost as surprising as his next words. “About your nightmare.”

“Why?” Harry asks, instead of any of the other things he should say. Like, _no_. Or _I haven’t even told Ron and Hermione_. Or, _if you kiss me like that, I'll think you mean it_ _._

Malfoy’s shrug is careless and practiced. “You already know mine.”

Malfoy’s fears are shaped like this: a childhood home with blood on the walls that you put there yourself. It’s the bent necks of your parents over a dining room table, and the sound of a snake that could eat you whole circling like a noose. It's a scar you will never be able to remove, no matter how many lines you run through it. It’s the twist of the words _you have to make us proud_ into a funeral march.

Harry’s lips still feel warm from Malfoy’s kiss, and this makes him suddenly, inexplicably terrified. It’s a mundane terror; far less deadly than the other horrors that Harry has known, will know. There’s no prophecy to determine the aftermath of what Harry feels right now, with his heart a startled deer in his chest.

He remembers, mouth dry, months late, that some things are inevitable, and Malfoy has always been one of them.

“Tell me,” Malfoy says again, softer.

And what else is Harry supposed to do? He has a heart that has always wanted to belong to someone else.

  
  


This is what Harry knows about Andromeda Tonks: she was Sirius’ favorite cousin, the middle of the Black sisters; she was burned off the family tapestry for marrying a muggleborn; she has a daughter named Nymphadora Tonks.

She is Malfoy’s idea, stumbled onto when Harry wondered aloud what it had been like for Sirius to leave his home while the first war was on. He never asked for the details. Every day, it feels like Harry finds a new question he should have asked.

“We should contact my aunt,” Malfoy says suddenly. They were sitting on the classroom floor with Harry still half in Malfoy’s lap, dinner long past and curfew creeping up on them.

Harry spits out, indignant and wounded, “ _Bellatrix_?”

“My _other_ aunt,” Malfoy corrects, his arms holding Harry in place when he tries to squirm out of his grip. “Andromeda Tonks.”

It’s a better idea than discussing the feasibility of sneaking Malfoy into Grimmauld Place without the knowledge of its secret keeper, in any case.

  
  


Each letter Harry pens to Andromeda is looked over with brutal precision by Malfoy before being sent off. Her replies are filled with subdued but pointed questions about the mysterious Slytherin he’d like her to speak with, and the plan Harry is working on with him.

It’s all very circumspect, because she doesn’t ask what she wants to know outright. She writes, for example, _Of course, advise me if a meeting with Dumbledore on your Slytherin’s behalf is necessary_ , and Malfoy says, _she wants to know if you trust Dumbledore._ So Harry writes, _We tried that and it didn’t help_ , and ignores Malfoy’s complaints that he shouldn’t be so forthright.

The letters are few but lengthy, and by the time November is settling into December, Harry is writing to ask if they could meet in person on the last Hogsmeade weekend before term ends.

“I bet it was hard for her,” Malfoy says, now, while Harry scribbles the last line of the letter—Andromeda has taken to asking about his studies and quidditch in between her probing—against the wall of the Owlery. It’s risky, always risky, when they linger in common areas for too long together, but the biting wind coming through the large, open windows is a deterrent for most students and Harry has his invisibility cloak tucked into his robes just in case.

Harry pauses with his quill hovering over the bottom of the parchment. There are more questions Malfoy wants to ask Andromeda, ones he won’t put to paper for fear of being discovered. This sounds like one of them.

There’s a yearning under it that Harry understands, that reminds him terribly of his very first letters to Sirius: Malfoy wants to trust her, so completely that it hurts Harry to see it. But Malfoy’s convinced Andromeda will cease all communication if they tell her who he is before Harry meets with her in person.

Harry watches the way Malfoy wrinkles his reddened nose at the wind, the way his hair sweeps against his brow, and has to forcibly pull his gaze away to focus on the letter before Malfoy notices his staring.

Not that Malfoy would mind it. Harry’s pretty sure that Malfoy finds it personally offensive if Harry doesn’t accidentally get caught staring at him at least once a day.

Harry adds a postscript: _He wants to know what it was like for you, when you realized what you grew up with was wrong._ There’s a blot of ink right at the beginning of the sentence. It feels like a truth, to leave it there.

“Is it different, now?” Harry asks, coaxing Hedwig down from the highest rafters. She lands next to Malfoy, the little traitor.

Malfoy is quiet while Harry ties the letter to Hedwig’s leg, wincing slightly when she insists on stepping onto his arm—her talons are sharp enough to feel through his layers—rather than taking flight directly from the perch.

The scent of snow is on the air, when Harry leans half out of the window with Hedwig on his arm and Malfoy’s arms tight around his waist.

Malfoy presses his cold nose against Harry’s nape when Harry straightens up, watching Hedwig soar overtop the Forbidden Forest, nearly indistinguishable from the grey morning sky.

Finally, quietly, Malfoy says, “It’s still hard, Potter. You can’t change that, either.”

Harry doesn’t really understand how it can be hard at all, and says as much. _It wasn't hard for Sirius_ , he doesn't say, because that's unfair. Harry doesn't _know_ when or how Sirius learned to detangle himself from the teachings of his family. He just knows that it ended with Sirius hating them. Saying he hated them.

“I still love them,” Malfoy points out, and it’s sad and it’s angry and it’s bitter. _I still love them_ , he says, and it sounds like _and I don't know if I still will, in the end_ _._

  
  


If pressed, Harry could admit that he spent more years of his life pretending to be living a different one than paying attention to his actual one. His most consistent daydream—his most elaborate—featured Lily and James Potter, alive and loving and warm. In his mind, their home— _his_ home, once—is a place of sunrises, bouquets on the kitchen table and cat hair on plush couch cushions. Laughter that no one tells him to shush and plates he doesn’t have to steal from. The whole house is tender like sheets on a line, scented with sun and grass. Dream knowledge. They weren’t always together, but they ended up that way. Learned knowledge. They have known each other since the beginning. Learned knowledge.

Recently, though, the house in Harry’s imagination is low lit, curtains half-open so only a strip of sunlight spills over folded bits of parchment and crowded side tables and soft, discarded jumpers. The echo of worn arguments fades against the soft murmur of music and the sharp scent of cologne lingers in the air. This home is tender like a bruise or something else once painful. Dream knowledge. They weren’t always together, but they ended up that way. Dream knowledge. They have known each other since the beginning.

Lived knowledge.

  
  


This is how the world ends: Hermione and Ron bust open the door in an anxious flurry, their voices loud and then tapering off abruptly. Harry, after a disorienting moment where he lifts his head from where it was somehow burrowed under Malfoy’s armpit, realizes that they’d inadvertently stayed the night in their dungeon classroom. The light from the window is bright white; it snowed overnight.

It takes another moment before Harry realizes that Hermione and Ron are not a figment of his imagination, but _actually_ standing there, expressions of mingled alarm and confusion on their faces. In one dark hand, Hermione holds the Marauder’s map; Ron, on her other side, holds the invisibility cloak in a tight, freckled grip. Both have their wands up, clearly having expected to see—well, just about anything other than this.

Harry starts to sit up, realizes he’s definitely still naked, and pauses. Malfoy’s hand, light on Harry’s back, twitches.

For several frozen seconds, the only sound Harry can hear is the rapid, guilty gallop of his heart.

“Well,” Malfoy says, breaking the silence with a casualness that is _almost_ convincing, “I suppose I’ll leave you to it.”

“ _What_?” Harry hisses, pinning Malfoy with a glare. Malfoy lifts his chin with as much dignity as he can muster when he’s still sleep-mussed and half-buried in his pillow, which is a distressing amount.

“They’re _your_ friends,” he whispers angrily, shifting so they’re not so tangled up in each other. He starts to get up, appears to have the same realization Harry had, and pauses. He throws a cold look over his shoulder and says, just this side of vicious, “Some privacy, if you don’t mind?”

“Harry—” Ron starts, voice strangled, at the same moment Hermione mutters something and casts at Harry. It feels the same way Pomfrey’s spells do when she’s checking for spell damage.

“ _Hermione_ ,” Harry says, scandalized. Malfoy makes a noise that suggests he, too, has been subjected to a diagnostic spell. “You can’t just—you shouldn’t—”

Unrepentant, Hermione says, “I think we should wait outside, Ron.”

She doesn’t slam the door, but the click is very, very final sounding. Harry flops back, then turns and buries his face in the pillow, debating on screaming into it.

“Does she _know_ how rude it is to cast spells on other people without warning, or does she just not care?” Malfoy shifts, the transfigured bed dipping as he sits up. When Harry doesn’t answer, he asks, “Are you feeling alright?”

“Aside from the fact that my best friends probably think I’m mental?” Harry’s voice is muffled by the pillow, but Malfoy’s impatient, “Yes, obviously,” tells Harry that he was still understood, if not sympathized with.

Harry thinks about it. “Yes,” he says, surprising himself. He’s sore, but that’s—he’s never minded that part. And he slept _well_ , and—and he woke up next to Malfoy. It’s a sappy sentiment that he will not divulge.

He lifts his face and twists so he can look at Malfoy, who’s staring at him with his hair still a mess. “What about you?” Harry asks, carefully.

Malfoy holds his gaze. Everything is softer in the wintry morning light, even the angles of his face. He says, “I’m fine.”

Harry starts to smile and promptly finds himself landing heavily on the stone floor, the transfiguration on the desks undoing itself and dropping both of them unceremoniously to the ground.

A loud laugh bursts out of Malfoy’s mouth, which he stifles immediately with a hand. But Harry is laughing, too, the tension running out of his limbs and disappearing into the cold air.

They get dressed quickly, walking out of the classroom and into an uncomfortable and tense stare-down. Hermione is vibrating with self-righteousness. Malfoy drips with unwarranted self-satisfaction. Possibly Harry should have said he _wasn’t_ okay, so Malfoy would appear appropriately abashed.

He wonders if an _obliviate_ is a bad idea.

Ron coughs. His face is a splotchy red. “Does this mean we’re at least over your Malfoy’s-a-Death-Eater theory?”

“Erm,” Harry says, as the weight of both Malfoy and Hermione’s gaze settle at the side of his head. _Oh god, oh no_ , he thinks.

“I mean,” Ron continues, with the air of a man learning optimism on the fly, “we could’ve guessed it. That obsession wasn’t normal, mate. If all you wanted to do was, yanno.” He makes an illustrative hand gesture. Harry's face burns. “Then that means you’re over that, yeah?”

He sounds so hopeful. All that guilt Harry has been avoiding rises up at once.

“Didn’t you—” he starts, then realizes that no, they probably _didn’t_ notice the Mark on Malfoy’s bare arm, caught up as they were in the incredulity of the entire situation.

And because Malfoy is nothing if not the bane of Harry’s entire, woebegotten existence, he says, “I am Marked, actually,” and lifts his fucking sleeve.

 _It was the quickest way to get them to believe it_ , Malfoy will say later, while Harry is in the middle of wishing visceral harm upon him. _It’s not like I had the pensieve handy._

All said, it’s a miracle that the ensuing chaos is short-lived, and that Harry still has the bruise paste in his bag.

  
  


“What I don’t understand,” Hermione says, when they’re gathered in a room created by the Room of Requirement, simple and sparse in walnut browns and creams, “is why you didn’t go to Dumbledore first thing.”

This is a very Hermione question, softened only slightly when Harry reminds her of Dumbledore’s frequent disappearances, citing his last lesson as further reminder that Dumbledore is not in the mind for listening. Her mouth twists in disapproval, and twists further at Malfoy’s small scoff; Hermione doesn’t understand Harry’s continual distrust in adults, even with their shared history between them.

Malfoy understands. Malfoy doesn’t trust adults either, or at least not anymore. Not after the adults in his life led him to the service of a madman by the force of their own adamant adherence to their prejudices.

Maybe it was always going to be Harry or no one. Just Malfoy, alone, to figure out how to not die when everything around him was so clearly manufactured to do just that.

“Then what are you _doing_?” Hermione asks, her eyes blazing when they meet Harry’s. She is not just asking about Malfoy’s change of heart, if she’s even convinced he’s had one. Hermione always wants more of an answer than Harry knows how to give.

She will ask this question again, much later; with the fire low in the grate in the Gryffindor common room and Malfoy off in the dungeons where he can’t begin his spiel on the cabinet and the pensieve and Andromeda Tonks, who might just be the elusive one-third needed to make their plan worth something. When it’s late enough that it’s only Harry, Ron, and Hermione in the common room, like a hundred times before, she will ask again, “What are you _doing_?”

It’s Ron, their collective heart, their cool under pressure, their big picture, who fills Harry’s silence with the more uncomfortable question. “What is it about Malfoy? Really?”

Harry shrugs a shoulder, avoiding their gazes to stare unblinking into the embers of the fire.

“Harry,” Hermione chides, like he’s being purposefully difficult. But Harry never learned how to talk about Malfoy like—like a rational fucking person. Some part of him latched onto Malfoy when they were eleven and never learned to calm down when his name came up in conversation, or when he spotted that distinctive white-blond across the Great Hall.

What is it about Malfoy? What _isn’t_ it about Malfoy? He’s a collision course and a synchronous orbit; everything Harry has ever hated and the only thing Harry has ever wanted. He’s the third constant in Harry’s life—death and hunger and Malfoy; Ron and Hermione and Malfoy—and the only one of them Harry doesn’t understand. If fate is real, it’s cruel, because even if they found themselves at opposite sides of this war, Harry Potter would still be defining his life with Draco Malfoy as an axis.

So Harry says, “I don’t know,” because he doesn’t know how to say that soulmates may not be real, but a hundred years from now, Malfoy still will be.

  
  


Here is a secret: Harry doesn’t think he’ll live to see the other side of the war. He’s been in mourning since he was fifteen and Dumbledore first asked what Harry planned to do, after hearing about the prophecy. It feels a lot longer ago than it was.

Here is a list that Harry doesn’t like to think about: getting drunk at a pub. A birthday after the war. Finishing school. Buying a house, the kind that has enough guest rooms for all of his friends to stay if they needed to. Learning to drive a car. Learning to drive a motorbike. Getting out of Britain. Gardening, for fun. Cooking, for fun. Seeing his parent’s grave. Having a family. Figuring out what to do with his hands and their wants.

Here is a list of things that used to be on the list Harry doesn’t like to think about: becoming quidditch captain. Getting a kiss that doesn’t make him uncomfortable. Touching someone, just—once, for long enough that he might even be able to relax into it. Having sex.

Here is a second secret: Harry is beginning to cling to the idea that he _will_ see the other side of the war. This is why _falling in love_ is not on either of those lists.

  
  


This is how the game ends: Harry asks _Do you think Andromeda would take you for Yule break?_ , and Malfoy, in tones of deep offense, answers _What the fuck are you talking about?_

“It’s _suicidal,”_ Harry snarls, as Ron and Hermione watch warily from their perch on the plush couch. They have become invested in helping hatch their madcap plan, if only because Harry is one half of the equation, but they seem to have a moment of regret in coming to meet them in the Room of Requirement again.

“Ignoring his summons would ensure a death sentence for my mother,” Malfoy says, voice icy, icy calm. The red in his face betrays his mounting anger. 

Malfoy is operating under the assumption that he will be returning to the Manor for Yule break. Harry is operating under the assumption that he can talk Malfoy into staying at Hogwarts. Facts at issue include: the increasingly worrying letters from Malfoy’s mother; the vanishing cabinet, still broken; the trustworthiness of Andromeda; the sense of reality crashing heavily around them and forcing them to make sense of the dust.

“He’ll kill you _both_ if he finds out what you’re planning on doing with your memories, Malfoy!” Harry shouts. “And that’s _without_ Voldemort finding out that you’ve been _sleeping with me for months._ ”

Malfoy’s reddens further, and someone—Ron, maybe—tries to interject. But something in Harry’s chest has boiled over and snapped, so he continues, voice rising impossibly louder, “What the fuck are you thinking? He’s going to _torture_ you for not killing Dumbledore yet, you and I both know that! If he even _thinks_ you’re not loyal to him—”

Harry keeps thinking of the graveyard, and the torture Voldemort inflicted on Avery, after throwing himself at his feet. Keeps thinking about the way a body contorts under the cruciatus. Keeps thinking about the deceptively gentle flutter of the Veil.

“He won’t find out,” Malfoy says, the edges of his anger beginning to show through his control. Harry knows that Malfoy’s occlumency shields have been sharpened to a killing point by Bellatrix, but that won’t be enough, can’t _possibly_ be enough to keep him safe—

“But you’ll risk it anyways?” Harry asks, with a mixture of disbelief and wry self-awareness. It’s the same thing that led him into the ministry last year, after all. It’s the same thing that lost him Sirius, and it will be his fault this time, too, if Malfoy—

“I am not abandoning my mother, Potter.” His voice is final.

“Yeah?” Harry asks, face hot with fury. The tables and bookshelves in the room shake with the force of it. “And what if she _doesn’t_ want to join you?”

“She will,” Malfoy says, with an ironclad faith that makes Harry want to throttle him.

“You don’t _know_ that,” Harry hisses. Narcissa Malfoy must love her son, but all he can see when he thinks of her is the distasteful look on her face back in the summer before fourth year. The day it feels like the war properly started, even if they didn’t know it then.

“Yes, I _do_ ,” Malfoy argues, finally losing control of his temper. He stalks forward and Harry holds his ground, glaring as Malfoy comes right up to him and grabs his chin in one hand as if _daring_ Harry to look away from him. “And this will be the only— _the only_ —chance I have to find time to speak with her freely. There is no point to any of this if the Dark Lord kills my mother. _None_.”

For the first time, the full force of the impossibility of what they’re doing hits Harry. Malfoy is a _Death Eater_ , expected to kill Dumbledore or die trying, and his home is filled with Voldemort’s forces, and Harry is just—just a teenager, same as Malfoy, with not nearly enough power to keep one fucking person safe. Forget the world, that wide, faceless expanse. The world won’t die. But the person, living and breathing and beautiful? The person _could_ , and Harry can’t—he _can’t—_

“Fine,” Harry bites out, the word coming up his throat like bile. Something flickers in Malfoy’s expression. “ _Fine_. Go get yourself killed then. If you never come back, I won’t _care_.”

He means to shout the last bit like a curse, but it comes out wrong. Raw and wet; gorey, like flinging out his still-beating heart. Harry feels shaky and light-headed, putting his hands on Malfoy’s chests and shoving, hard enough to unbalance the both of them.

Harry catches himself first, then spins and hurries out of the room; hurries until his feet trip over each other, until he’s running down, down, down the staircases and through the corridors, dodging clanging armor and startled ghosts and ignoring the shouts of the portraits he passes.

He runs like Dudley is after him, when he was seven and breakable; like he’s one faltering step from finding his head in a toilet or his throat in a chokehold. Runs like he’s escaping the graveyard, like he’s escaping the Death Eaters at the Ministry, like if he runs fast enough and long enough, there will no longer be any bodies at his back.

His feet are light and flawless, his thighs burning and his chest tight, as he races out of the west exit, closest to the greenhouses, and keeps going. On and on, through the powdery snow and low hills until he’s at the quidditch pitch, serene and white under the moonlight.

Harry collapses on his back, breathing hard, sweat stinging his eyes and dripping down his body. It’s freezing; he doesn’t register this immediately, but as the heat from his run dissipates, he realizes that he left with only his uniform and his wand. His back is wet and stinging from the snow and his fingers, not gloved, hurt when he curls them around his wand to cast, in quick succession, an impervious charm and drying charm on his clothes, and a warming charm.

Harry stays with his back pressed against the snow for so long that he has to recast the warming charm twice, the stars and moon and clouds distant, blurry points of white overhead. The air stings his throat and lungs, but he revels in every distracting inhale.

He doesn’t want to think of what choice Malfoy will make if his mother disagrees with him, and he certainly doesn’t want to think of what will happen if Malfoy never returns from the Manor. Harry’s chest burns at the thought; he presses his hands against his closed eyelids, shoving his glasses awkwardly atop his head with the movement, and applies pressure until color bursts.

This is the other option they claw out of what’s available to two boys nobody wants to believe are already soldiers: a war cannot be won without its soldiers, so get rid of the soldiers and the stronghold. A vanishing cabinet is an easy loophole through unknowing wards, once fixed; a pensieve can store the layout of a manor overrun with Death Eaters, and the location of every prisoner besides; the only thing they need are forces, and a Slytherin aunt with an auror daughter involved in the secretive Order of the Phoenix could solve that problem neatly.

An heir going back to the home he was trying to escape had never crossed Harry’s mind. It should have. Malfoy has never questioned Harry's will to fight in the war, but Harry never asked what role _Malfoy_ planned to have. He thought this was it: offering up information, for other people to handle.

But then, this year has been full of surprises.

It’s quiet out here, blissfully so, which is why Harry hears the soft crunch of footsteps long before they come to a stop next to him. Malfoy leans over him and blots out the moon, his hair loose and swaying slightly in the breeze, his nose and cheeks red with cold. His winter cloak makes his body one long, dark line against the bitterly blue sky, in sharp contrast to the pale glow of his face and hair. He’s beautiful, which Harry already knew. It’s only that he never lets himself think that, normally.

Malfoy had always been something rare to him. Like a glittering jewel, sharp angles and vivid in the light. Harry reaches up, to brush knuckles across cheekbones, and is surprised that this touch no longer splits skin.

“How’d you find me?” Harry asks, after a few silent seconds of staring at each other, his hand falling away. The cloud of his breath eclipses Malfoy’s face for a moment, a wispy cloud across a heartbreaking sky.

“You ran through the snow like a troll in an antiques shop. It wasn’t difficult,” Malfoy answers. “May I sit?”

“Oh, is that what we ask about?”

Malfoy’s mouth turns unhappy. “I’m actually _trying_ to not argue with you again.”

Something about that answer releases the tight coil residing in Harry’s gut. “Okay,” Harry says, and struggles into a seated position while Malfoy folds himself stiffly next to him. He tosses something heavy and warm Harry’s way without looking at him.

Harry focuses on wrapping himself in the cloak—Malfoy’s, an old one that is as heavy as Malfoy’s body against his—and putting his glasses back in place so as not to be the one to start this conversation.

Only when Malfoy starts speaking, it’s not at all the conversation Harry was expecting.

“Weasley thinks we’re boyfriends,” Malfoy says, the inflection turning it into a question.

Harry keeps his gaze on the silhouette of the Forbidden Forest, to save himself from seeing whatever expression is on Malfoy’s face. “Does he?” Harry asks, heart beating nearly in his tongue.

The same night Ron had asked Harry _what is it about Malfoy,_ he’d asked, in a different sort of voice, if Harry and Malfoy have _really_ been having sex. Not, Ron had been quick to assure a red-faced Harry, that he needed _details_ ; it was only that he and Lavender were dating, after all, and who else was he supposed to talk about these things with, Hermione?

And no, Harry had agreed, thinking of Hermione’s frostiness towards Lavender and how even _he_ could see where her hurt was stemming from, that was right out for sure.

Besides, Harry kind of _wanted_ to talk about it. Not just the sex—though that was good, that was _really really_ good, and Harry kept saying so, liked he was awed by it all over again, until Ron had started making exaggerated gagging noise at him—but the tiny truths that had emerged since September: the curl of Malfoy’s sweaty hair, and the rumble of his laugh, and the way his voice changes when he needs to be talked out of the closed loop of his brain, and the infuriating circles he talks when they’re arguing, and the nightmares they swap when they’re curled around each other like ivy, boneless and defenseless and secret.

 _You guys_ , Ron had said, with a strange note in his voice, _talk a lot more than me and Lav_.

“Yes,” Malfoy says now, a touch harried. Like it’s another question.

Harry burrows deeper into Malfoy’s cloak, his fingers so tight on the fabric that they ache. “Does it bother you?”

Harry isn’t stupid. There are things that can last, and then there’s the incoming combustion of him and Malfoy. This is something that is meant to end in acrid smoke. 

That doesn’t mean Harry can’t _pretend_. It just means that he can’t say anything about the pretending. So he folds his hands under the cloak, to stop them from betraying him, and bites his lip, for the same reason.

“Does it bother _you_?” Malfoy asks, insistent, and that’s the thing about Malfoy, isn’t it? He can never let a thing lie, but is equally incapable of talking in a straight line.

The breath Harry huffs out hangs in the air, accusing. “Well, Malfoy,” he says, caustic, “what else am I supposed to call the bastard that’s been buggering me stupid for the past four months?”

Malfoy’s voice cools so immediately, it’s a wonder ice doesn’t fall straight from his mouth. “I’ve heard a dildo will do much the same, if you’re so eager to clear up the misunderstanding. I certainly won’t care.”

“That isn’t—that’s not—” Harry slants a look at him, stunned by the force of Malfoy’s vitriol. Malfoy’s tone is always more telling than anything he ever says. “I don’t want a fucking dildo, Malfoy. I didn’t mean—”

“How _gratifying_ ,” Malfoy interrupts, his voice going deceptively light, “to know I rate just above sex toys, in Harry Potter’s listing of potential beaus.”

“Oh my _god_ , shut up,” Harry snaps, torn between a truly unhinged urge to begin laughing and genuine, overwhelming exasperation. “I’m not—I don’t know how to _do_ this, you prick.”

“I’d say you’ve figured out how to do my prick, actually. What else could you _possibly_ want?” Malfoy says snidely, and Harry remembers why he hated this boy so fiercely for so long. Harry puts his hands over his face and makes a garbled, helpless noise of irritation, the words muffled by his hands.

Daggers would be less painful than the force of Malfoy’s glare. “ _What_ was that?”

Harry drags his hands down his face, turning his head to meet Malfoy’s glare straight on. Malfoy is holding himself so stiffly, he looks likely to break.

“I want,” Harry repeats through clenched teeth, his whole body shaking, “to hold your hand, Malfoy. You berk. You—you _stupid_ bastard. You’re the worst boyfriend I’ve ever had.”

Malfoy’s glare falters, his mouth falling open slightly in surprise. It’s the first time Harry’s rendered him speechless without being on his knees.

He inhales, and it hitches funny. Harry says again, his voice wavering, “I just want to hold your stupid fucking _hand_ , Malfoy.”

Malfoy holds out his stupid fucking hand. He looks dazed when Harry slips their fingers together. It’s a very good fit.

“You’ve never had a boyfriend before,” Malfoy says, after a moment. He sounds slightly hysterical.

“Neither have you,” Harry counters, though he doesn’t know if it’s true.

“Untrue,” Malfoy says. Harry fights down a frankly astonishing wave of jealousy. “I’ve been seeing this utter prat since September, you know, but I assumed we were over when he said he wouldn’t care if I never came back from my family’s evil lair.”

Harry sucks in a startled breath that gets caught in all the soft places in his throat and belly. It makes his voice naked. “Don’t joke.”

“Who’s joking?” Malfoy sounds neutral, somehow all put together again in the time it’s taken for Harry to fall apart.

Harry pulls his knees to his chest and presses his forehead to them. Malfoy is still holding his hand. It’s stupid, how much that means to him.

Harry tilts his head, but doesn’t quite look at Malfoy. “I didn’t mean it,” he says quietly. “I would—I would—”

He’d storm the Manor. He’d end the war himself. He’d carry the mourning for the rest of his life, in the same place he carries all his dead, and then urge the wind to continue in his stead.

Malfoy squeezes his hand, gently.

“I know,” Malfoy says, equally soft. But he can’t possibly.

“You could _die_ ,” Harry says, squeezing back much harder.

Malfoy’s mouth twists. “I won’t die, Potter.”

“Why not? Because you said so?”

“You’re not really thinking straight,” Malfoy chides, but there’s no heat behind it. “I’m not useful if I’m dead, and it would be more suspicious if I don’t show up. Even _Weasley_ agreed with me on that.”

“ _Why?_ ”

Malfoy tugs on Harry’s hand until Harry lifts his head and looks at him. Malfoy’s eyes are very grey. They are locked unerringly onto Harry’s. “Because if I go, he’ll think I’m still afraid.”

All the air leaves Harry’s lungs at once. “Oh,” he whispers.

“Right.” Malfoy sounds a little cross about it all; Harry smiles weakly despite himself. “So stop being an idiot about this. It’s only two weeks.”

For all his bravado, though, there’s a slight tremor working through him that Harry can feel through their joined hands. He shifts closer, feeling an unwarranted shyness, before giving up pretense entirely and nudging Malfoy’s legs apart to seat himself in the space between his long legs. Harry’s knees fall on either side of Malfoy’s torso, Malfoy’s hand still in his grip.

“Do you think he’ll make you—?” Harry begins, uncertain.

“I don’t know,” Malfoy says stiffly, dropping his gaze. “I’ll do what I have to.”

 _You wouldn’t have to at all if you stayed_ , Harry thinks impotently. _Or if you’d never taken the Mark in the first place_. He exhales forcefully, glaring at the outline of the pitch and Hogwarts behind Malfoy’s shoulder.

There’s no use in arguing with the past. That doesn’t mean Harry isn’t still furious with it.

“I could find a way to tell you,” Malfoy says, with a faux-indifference that betrays how he must have been thinking of it for a while. There’s probably already a plan in his head, one of those furious, impossible ones, and he’s only been biding his time until it felt right to bring it up. “That I’m okay. If it would help.”

“Yeah,” Harry says, unhappily aware that _he_ is not the one who will be facing all his nightmares in two weeks. “I don’t feel like I’ve helped you at all.”

Malfoy lifts his head, at that; tilts it up towards the sky and the stars as he says to the moon, “You’ve done more than you think, Potter.”

“I want to do more,” Harry mutters, thinking about the memories already stored in the pensieve and the letter he received from Andromeda, confirming their meeting.

“Oh?” Malfoy’s lips curl into a familiar, maddening smirk; Harry’s stomach flips, and he promptly loses his thread of thought. “Want to do more of _what_ , exactly?”

This is a distraction. Harry kisses him anyways. Harry kisses Malfoy like his mouth was designed to do only that for hours and hours and hours on end. Harry _knows_ Malfoy’s mouth, the familiar shape and feel of it; he knows it colliding against his in the spare minutes between classes or warm against his collarbones or soft at the small of his back, and it still somehow feels like he’s going to learn something new, this time, when Malfoy’s mouth opens under his.

Harry pulls away just long enough to say, “We should—” before he’s cut off by Malfoy’s searing, insistent kiss. A shiver that has nothing to do with the cold has Harry pressing closer, running his hands along Malfoy’s jaw and through his hair.

“Your hands are bloody freezing,” Malfoy complains, barely moving his mouth away enough to make the words audible.

Harry doesn’t feel freezing; his whole body is alight as Malfoy’s cold hands disappear under Harry’s borrowed cloak to ruck up Harry’s shirt and tease the skin above his trousers before slipping deftly lower. Harry rocks his hips forward, groaning low in his throat at the lazy way Malfoy touches him through his pants.

“Fuck,” he breathes, before remembering that Malfoy was doing this specifically to distract him from the conversation they need to have about the Manor and what it means for their conversation with Andromeda. He curls a reluctant hand around Malfoy’s wrist. “Wait, wait. I was trying to say something, Malfoy.”

“Was it about getting your cock in my mouth? Personally, I’m in favor.”

Harry groans, unable to help it; a helpless sort of laugh follows after. “ _No_.” Then, more than a little interested, “Right now? Here?”

Malfoy grins, wide and mischievous. He’s brilliant against the backdrop of snow and dark sky. “Is that a yes?”

Harry magnanimously decides the conversation can wait.

  
  


Sometimes, Harry thinks it comes down to this: Draco Malfoy, before he was anything else, was the first person Harry ever wanted to impress. He’d spent years accustomed to being ignored by adults and other children alike, and by the time he was eleven, he’d learned to shy away from attention. Nothing good ever came from it, so Harry had contented himself with lunches behind dumpsters and entertained himself with sprawling stories in his head and then—

The thing is, magic was _real._ Magic was real, and it was _his_ , so who was to say that the other things he made up in his head couldn’t be real? Parents who had been kind and loving, and friends who would stand by him, and someone, somewhere, who would say his name like they _meant_ it?

Harry fell fast in love with everything he saw on that first gilded day in Diagon Alley, the store displays and impossible doorways and the pale, pointy boy, looking right at him, messy hair and broken glasses and all, who said _hullo_. 

For that one, shining moment, at least, Harry might have been in love, until everything that came to pass, came to pass.

  
  


The last Hogsmeade trip of the year takes place on December 14th, the sky overhead muted and insistent with either rain or snow. Harry finds himself glancing upwards during his walk through Hogsmeade, mostly because he doesn’t want to think too hard about his destination and only a little because the color reminds him of Malfoy’s eyes.

Even from the alleyway to its side, Madam Puddifoot's cafe manages to exude a nauseous, cramped frilliness. Harry would rather not step inside until he absolutely has to, as even this proximity has him remembering confetti in his tea and ill-advised dates with girls he doesn’t think he properly fancied after all.

“She couldn’t have been _serious_ about meeting here?” Malfoy’s voice is very close and distinctly appalled. He’s invisible under Harry’s cloak, and Harry barely jumps when he feels the weight of Malfoy’s body press alongside Harry’s arm.

“Maybe she plans on taking us somewhere else to talk?” Harry drags the toe of his trainers through slushy snow, leaning against Malfoy and wondering vaguely if the cloak will hide them both enough to sneak a snog in—they've gotten very good at quick snogs and handjobs in inadvisable places—when he spots a figure that turns his breath to ice.

Malfoy makes a small noise, like a frightened animal, because Bellatrix Lestrange is walking up the Hogsmeade street, easy as you please.

“It’s not,” Malfoy says barely a heartbeat later. Harry doesn’t quite register that the words are meant for him until he feels the invisible hand on his wrist, stilling its course to where his wand is sheathed. “That’s—mother always said Aunt Andromeda and Aunt Bellatrix looked the most alike.”

It takes another blink before Harry relaxes and actually _sees_ the imposing woman walking along the street, with a slightly shorter man at her side. The soft roundness to her face, the way her dark curls are streaked slightly with grey. She has Bellatrix’s same, heavyset eyes, but on her they are gentle; the pointed nose he associates with Draco, faintly freckled. By the time she and her husband reach the entrance of Madam Puddifoot’s, Harry can comfortably see the differences that speak of Andromeda Tonks.

“Merlin,” he breathes, as the pair disappears inside, “She must get into all sorts of uncomfortable arguments because of it.”

Malfoy hums noncommittally. “The perils of looking precisely like disfavored family members, I suppose.”

When Malfoy says stuff like that, Harry needs to be able to see his face. He fumbles for the loose end of the invisibility cloak.

“What—we’ll be late meeting her—”

“Shut up,” Harry whispers, just as he gets the cloak open. He pulls Malfoy close, spinning them so Harry’s back is to the wall. He holds the ends of the cloak above his head, hiding them both from view so he can frown at Malfoy.

Malfoy frowns right back and Harry takes a moment to properly look at him, to properly _see_ him. The line of his nose and the slant of his cheekbones and the taper of his eyebrows. The curl of his pale eyelashes and the curve of his lips and the shape of his jaw. The sweep of his white-blond hair and the delicate set of his ears and the dove grey of his eyes.

There’s the body and then there’s the startled heart, and Harry knows both enough, now, to say, “You aren't anything like your father,” and mean it. If his hands were free, if they weren’t hidden in an alleyway under a cloak, he would map out the differences with his fingers, every dip and valley that he knows to be Draco and Draco alone. He would point out where Draco’s fingernails bite into the flesh of his palm when he’s frustrated, and the spot on his thigh where he’ll tap out a nervous rhythm when Harry lays out the harms he caused when they were younger, and the hollows between each finger where his hands suffocate each other when Draco is haltingly questioning what used to be a truth to him. Learned knowledge, the kind you can only get by paying attention. Harry has been paying attention. He’s always been.

“You’re _not_ ,” Harry says, quietly but firmly, because he can see Draco getting ready to argue. “And Andromeda’s not going to hate you just because you look like your father.”

“Maybe she’ll hate me anyways,” Draco says, staring at Harry’s nose. “Maybe she’ll hate me on my own merit.”

“She’ll love you,” Harry says fiercely. “She’ll get to know you and won’t even be able to help loving you.”

Draco’s mouth quirks up. He doesn’t quite meet Harry’s eyes when he asks, “You’re sure of that, are you?”

Harry has to swallow a bunch of flippant responses to answer, “I am.”

And Draco, clouds parting, smiles.

  
  


This is the quietest dream Harry has: he knows what to do with his hands. Draco kisses him good morning in full view of everyone in the Great Hall. The world doesn’t end. If there is water, there is also a pale hand, plunging after him to pull him up. Catastrophe is averted. Somewhere, light streams through open windows.

  
  


A week later, Harry is stepping out of the carriages and onto the platform at Hogsmeade station, where the crimson Hogwarts Express waits for them. He tucks his nose into the thick, enchanted scarf wound around his neck—Draco’s gift to him—and lets himself be pushed onto the train and down the corridor by the flow of his friends and classmates.

A flash of white blond has Harry pausing before he steps inside the compartment Hermione and Ginny have already claimed. Draco is making his way through the throngs of students, face set into his default haughtiness. It flickers, briefly, when he spots Harry.

Harry tries—and probably fails—to keep his expression neutral.

Draco comes to a stop, and with a slow, deliberate sneer, says, “Potter,” like it’s the foulest thing to have ever come out of his mouth.

God, but it isn’t. He’d spent the evening before proving just how filthy his mouth could be, and this morning showcasing its sweetness. Harry digs his fingers into the door of the compartment, to distract from the way his stomach is knotting itself.

“Malfoy,” he answers coolly, as people disappear further down the train and into the remaining compartments, the first warning whistle at their heels.

The sneer is quickly replaced with the smirk that has continually proven to be Harry’s downfall. Without looking away from Harry, Draco flips a golden galleon with a gloved hand—Harry’s gift to him—and catches it deftly before knocking deliberately into Harry’s shoulder and continuing his trek to his own compartment. Harry tries to push aside the errant, unwanted thought of impending danger as he watches Draco walk away.

Two weeks without him is going to be torture for many, many reasons.

“Ugh, will he ever stop being _such_ a fucking git?” asks Ron, who enjoys covering for the way Harry sometimes goes tongue-tied when he’s supposed to be fighting with Draco by loudly insulting Draco in Harry's stead. At some point, Harry will have to tell him off for it; he's beginning to enjoy it _too_ much.

Ron throws a companionable arm around Harry’s shoulder and drags him inside the compartment, where the rest of their friends are already lounging. Harry waits for the discomfort to come, but it’s distant and ignorable for the moment. His shoulders stay relaxed under Ron’s lanky arm.

“Think he’s always gonna be a git,” Harry says honestly, under his breath so only Ron can hear him, while Hermione tuts from her seat near the window. Across from her, Neville is asking Luna bemusedly about the headline of the Quibbler’s Holiday and Arcane Rituals Edition. Ginny flounces out just as quickly as she went in, going in search of Dean in a rush of loose red hair while her bag, abandoned next to Luna, marks her seat should she deign to return.

Ron throws a wary glance to the door—because for some not-entirely unfathomable reason, he and Lavender have not actually broken up yet and he’s definitely terrified of the moment she and Parvati will join them in the compartment—before falling into the seat next to Hermione.

Harry shoves Ron over a seat and tucks himself into the space between them, because if he doesn’t get to ride with Draco, he’s at least going to ensure he has a best friend on either side of him. Hermione pats his knee somewhat absently, already arguing with Luna about the veracity of a ritual that sounds, to Harry, like it’s just meant to make you get frostbite.

“Did you know,” Ron says, voice pitched low, “that Mum said the Tonks’ might be stopping by for Christmas? Sounds like Order business.”

“Really?” Harry asks, ignoring the significant look Ron is trying to give him. In his pocket, a golden galleon burns against his thigh. “I’m sure that will be interesting.”

The snow glitters as the Hogwarts Express picks up speed, a rush of white and green and grey blurring together as they begin the long trek back towards Platform 9 and 3/4. Harry curls his palm around the galleon, tucks his nose into his scarf, and breathes.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading!! this fic was a pain in the ass to finish, but i hope it was enjoyable.
> 
> kudos and comments always appreciated. i also now have a [curiouscat that you can drop a q at](https://curiouscat.qa/asofthaven) if you'd like!


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